Logical Times- Spring 2017

Newsletters

If you have ever heard President Weinberg speak about Denison, one of the first things he mentions is the relationships. As I reflect on another year at Denison, this message of relationships could not ring more true for our department. Relationships between students, between faculty, between alums, and all other such permutations. Denison is a great place to be and I am humbled by the chance to serve such a dedicated faculty and engaging group of students.

We are blessed to have Dee Ghiloni as our phenomenal Academic Administrative Assistant. Hopefully you have noticed her efforts to share news about the department through her weekly posts to Facebook and our What’s Happening section on the department website.

Turning to faculty members, Dr. Bressoud has been very busy. He has recently co-authored two papers with Jessica Tang (’16), taken students to Ohio Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, and was a mentor to the HackOH5 Student Newspaper Hackathon along with Dr. Havill. Dr. Havill was an invited panelist at the annual SIGCSE conference in Seattle where he discussed his book, Discovering Computer Science. Dr. Kretchmar and our students have been touring the programming contest circuit where they had a good showing at the ACM ICPC East Central North America Regional Programming Contest and dominated the OWU Programming Contest. Even though he was on sabbatical this past year, we are thankful that Dr. Lall taught a very successful Game Design class. While reinvigorating our statistics offerings this past year, Dr. White still found time to keep a very active research program and will be taking his junior-leave in Australia to continue his work there. After returning from a productive junior-leave at Virgina Tech, Dr. Mei jumped right back in to her busy schedule, including hosting a viewing and discussion of the movie Hidden Figures. Dr. Westmoreland presented his work at the Fifth Biannual Fundamental Questions Institute in Banff, Alberta.

We are happy to announce that Dr. (Crown) Rundell has moved back to Granville with her family and has about a four minute walking-commute to her office in Olin! Dr. Wolff took a group of students to present at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics (NCUWM). Dr. Neal has played a key role in developing the coursework for the new Data Analytics major by leveraging his experience on his recent NSF grant. As our number of majors continued to grow, we were fortunate to have some expert help in the classroom from Matt Steinke (’08), Ali Miller and Dr. Laura Dolph-Bosley.

We are happy to announce that Laura and Ali will be joined by Dr. Bill Robinson of the University of Kentucky, each with a three-year contract. They will also be joined Dr. Jaimie Kelley of OSU who is starting a tenure-track position in computer science in the fall. We are also thankful that Dr. Krone was able to switch-hit for us this semester and teach an introductory statistics course. Test your skills with these puzzles If all this reminiscing is making long for your Denison instructors, you can get a taste of what you’ve been missing by visiting our YouTube page where a number of our faculty members present logic puzzles for a high school contest. Test your skills before watching the solution!

For more Student, Faculty and Alumni updates please download the full departmental newsletter below: